Thank you. That's a very good question.
I'm heartened to hear the mention of peace-building and conflict resolution. That's certainly an area we are concerned about.
In terms of readiness, I think many people and our organization have argued that we should be making increased contributions to UN peacekeeping operations, for instance. We have traditionally been a main contributor, and at one point we were the highest-level contributor of troops to UN peacekeeping operations. Right now we're down somewhere around Malawi. According to the latest numbers we have for 2011, you could fit all of our soldiers who do UN peacekeeping missions in a single school bus. We have 35. In fact, we send more police on UN peacekeeping operations--about 163--than troops. So I think that's a shift that would be supported by Canadians. They want our forces to contribute internationally. UN peacekeeping is definitely one of those areas that we want to do.
Mr. Alexander, I'm not suggesting that we be less ready. I believe we're overspending on national defence right now. We've had a tremendous increase over the last ten years of more than 12% a year. It has outpaced government spending by one and a half times the amount of growth. We are now spending more than we were at any point during the Cold War. This seems to be a tap that only turns one way.
Listening to some of the other presentations here, there's always an argument for more and more. But as members of Parliament, you know that there's only one taxpayer, as they say. Every dollar you contribute here means a dollar that you're not able to contribute over there. You have to balance these out. That's your responsibility as elected representatives and as members of the government on your side.
I think we need to be smarter. Certainly reductions need to be made across the board. Defence could bear more of those. I don't see it as being less ready. For instance, we're spending millions of dollars on submarines that are not operational right now, and there's very little chance of them ever being operational. I think that reducing spending on them would not diminish our readiness in any way. I think we've wasted more than a billion dollars on Leopard tanks that we've hardly used and are set for retirement. I'm not sure we actually needed all of them. Close combat vehicles are another issue. I don't think the Canadian government needs to go ahead on them, in addition to the F-35s. I would put them in the same category.